The Bewitching Magic of the “Ass” Intensifier
An ode to the anal emphatic.
As the daffodils begin to wriggle their yellowed mops up through the pullulating soil, and the cock robin whistles the horniest jingle he can summon beneath the twiggen balcony of his hen—as spring itself begins, whole-ass, to sproing, the thoughts of a young(ish) man turn, inevitably, to the suffixal bound morpheme known affectionately as the “Ass” intensifier. And what an intensifier it is! As Daniel Siddiqi notes in his seminal-ass paper, “The English Intensifier Ass”:
“Ass seems to have a requirement that it appear right of the adjective that it is modifying AND left of the head the adjective modifies.”
Which is to say that unlike its boring-ass friend, “very,” which primly insists on fussing around behind whatever adjective it’s supposed to be intensifying, “ass” slips in like an assassin (sorry) and intensifies the unsuspecting adjective after the fact but before the noun has a chance to reach the crime scene and survey the damage. Returning to the vernal clownery where we started by way of an example, one could say (depending on the politeness of the company), “That’s one horny-ass cock robin!” but never, “That cock robin is horny-ass.”¹
In “Serious-Ass Morphology: The Anal Emphatic in English,” Diana Elgersma theorizes that “ass” got…
